Prof Gary Rolfe

Rolfe – it’s a good name, eh? Firstly, it’ my middle name (yes, spelled with an ‘e’ on the end’) and it’s the name of Rolfe who devised the Rolfe Method (with others) for reflective practice, in 2001.

Let’s start at the beginning – with what on earth ‘reflective practice’ is. Put simply, it’s a formal, systematised way of looking back at what you’ve done (such as a presentation, obviously!) and learning from it. Importantly you do it in a systematic way so that you

• don’t miss anything; and
• avoid navel-gazing.

Of course, as a professional presenter, you’d expect me to carry out a bit of reflective practice at the end of every session – and I strongly, strongly recommend it for you. If not, how are you to learn about what to improve? Of course, you can also get feedback from the people who heard and saw your present but I’ve written in other places about the perils of heading feedback (or at least only feedback).

It’s worth mentioning that there are, obviously, dozens and dozens of ways of carrying out reflective practice and your preferences and mileage may vary but the Rolfe Methodology is the one we use. For us it has the optimum trade-off of power vs convenience.
It works like this. At the end of the presentation, ask yourself the question ‘what’ three times. Specifically ask it like this

• What?
• So What?
• Now What?

And here’s the interpretation…

What?

This is simply to ask yourself what happened. Be specific. Think in terms of actual acts, moments and events. After all, you can’t learn anything from ‘It went well’ because there is nothing there you can actually work with and change.

So What?

What were the consequences of this? The ‘what’ question is fine but it’s the implications and consequences of things that happened that are important.

Now what?

Having looked at the ‘so what’ things, this is where you jot down what you’re going to do about it. If it was something that went wrong, this is where you figure out how to stop it happening again: if it went well, look at how you can make sure it does repeat.

Ready for an example?

What? The venue didn’t have a long enough VGA cable, to connect our laptop to their projector
So What? This meant that the laptop had to be next to the projector, not where we wanted it
Now What? We now carry a 25m VGA cable ourselves so that we can put our laptop anywhere up to 25m from the projector.

Simple, eh?